Noby Noby Boy UK Review

It's all perfectly natural - at a stretch.

Noby Noby Boy takes a while to click, because enjoying it necessitates a complete recalibration of your gaming brain. You need to learn to stop searching for any kind of meaning or objective in its colourful madness, stop expecting it to reward you or compliment you or, really, pay any attention at all to your intrusion upon its perfectly self-contained little universe. Some will dismiss it as pointless, ridiculous and repetitive – and that's entirely fair, because it's all of those things. But if you let it, Noby Noby Boy can take you back to a time when you didn't care about objectives, and played merely for the enjoyment of playing itself.

のびのび (nobinobi) in Japanese means, roughly, 'hang loose' – stretch out, procrastinate, be easy – and that's all the game's about. It's a giant whimsical timesink. You control BOY, who loosely resembles two stretchy globules of pink chewing gum connected by an ever-extending stripy scarf. Each stick controls one end of BOY – pull them in opposite directions and he starts stretching and stretching into a looping, barely controllable spaghetti mess. The game's gravity-light physics make it extremely difficult to stay still, though pressing the R2 and L2 buttons makes BOY grab hold of the ground to control his wild undulations.

The denizens of BOY's world are remarkably unperturbed by all this.

Tapping the same buttons makes BOY jump and float, flopping weirdly through the sky above the tiny level grids. You can consume and expel things, propelling you across the surreal and brightly-coloured landscape. The camera is controlled by holding down the L1 and R1 buttons in various combinations and tilting the controller – that probably sounds horribly cumbersome, but it's perfectly intuitive once you get used to it. Zoom all the way out and you can see the entire planet, with a cheerful sun-headed lion staring down at your antics and what looks like a giant BOY (GIRL, as it turns out, but more on that later) stretching out into the cosmos.

The game's levels are randomly generated. Scooch into the BOY House, select Move, and you'll have an entirely new area before you in just a few seconds. They're large, usually flat grids populated by animals, weird humanoids and a plethora of toybox objects and simple contraptions to knock over, eat, wind BOY around or thread him through. The world's inhabitants conduct themselves with a kind of unhinged spontaneity, deciding seemingly at random whether to chase BOY around in a car, jump on him for a ride or run from him in terror. Its animals range from the expected – cows, pigs, lions – to the more esoteric – tapirs, turtles, sphinxes – and the same can be said for all the other objects, too. Noby Noby throws up significantly different combinations of these strange artefacts almost every single time.

The stretchiest player in the WHOLE WORLD gets to be the king lion.

You can't die, or fail (or succeed, as it happens) – fall off the edge of the world and BOY splurges back out the chimney of the BOY House like Play-Doh spaghetti. Leave the controller alone and BOY starts wandering about this madness on his own, unperturbed by your absence. There's a built in screenshot feature and you can even capture videos by holding the Square button, uploading them straight to YouTube – like we have for you, right here – while the game happily carries on in the background.

After briefly introducing you to the controls, Noby Noby Boy just leaves you to make your own entertainment. What you do depends on what happens to be around you. You might find yourself in a bare forest populated entirely by ghosts and penguins, trying to wind yourself around the trees, or attempting to hook a floating doughnut cloud round one of them. There might be giant fruit with holes just big enough for a careful BOY to thread through that you obsessively use to turn yourself into a fruit necklace. You might decide to chase animals, or eat every single doughnut in the level, or persuade prancing Mariachis to ride you for a while. You'll even make exciting new discoveries every once in a while, such as the world-changing realisation that, by combining certain items, you can create flamingerinas or ghostguins.